Application Terms


In order to participate in the competition, candidates must have
  • developed personally,
  • a significant, new OR implementation with a measurable impact
  • in the context of a thesis (PhD, Post-Doc or Master), or a research project carried out in a research center in Belgium or elsewhere
  • and contributed it to the community under a Open-Source license.

This work can be made as an extension to an existing open-source OR project (like COIN-OR, or-tools, SCIP, Scampi, Choco, Gecode, drools-planner, …), but the candidate’s contribution should be clearly identified.

Your implementation must be new (started less than 4 years ago), not necessarily the algorithms or ideas. The implementation should be related to Operations Research (OR) and have a measurable impact. Some example implementations eligible are:
    • Mixed Integer Programming
      • Valid inequalities generation for a category of MIP problems
      • Branch-and-bound parallelization
    • Constraint programming
      • Global constraints in an existing Constraint Programming solver
      • Distributed constraint programming
    • Heuristics
      • Local search library
      • Ant-colony algorithm
      • Particle swarm optimization
      • Genetic/memetic algorithm
      • Meta-heuristics toolbox
    • Graphs
      • Graph optimization algorithms (matching, flows, spanning trees…)
    • Other optimization techniques
      • Derivative free optimization algorithm
      • Dynamic programming
      • Stochastic programming
      • Robust programming
      • Difference of Convex function algorithm
      • Knapsack solver
    • Tools
      • Visualization library for local search
      • Automatic tuning of solver parameters
      • discrete event simulation library or components
      • modeling/wrapper layer to solve optimization problems
    • Algorithms for dedicated problems
      • Car production sequencing
      • Nurse rostering
      • Portfolio management
      • Optimal power flow
      • Vehicle routing library
      • TSP solver
The source code must be released under a well-known Open-Source license (GPL, MIT, LGPL, MIT, Apache2, BSD, EPL, …) and available on the web (e.g. BitBucket, GitHub, Google Code, SourceForge,...).

Competition Schedule & Evaluation Criteria

Candidates will send a 5-page report to the Jury before September 1, 2012 at wolsey-award@n-side.com. This report should contain:
  • Candidate name, email address, address, institution, very short biography
  • The project name, objective and description
  • The project website URL (if applicable)
  • The URL where the sources can be downloaded.
In case the project builds upon or uses existing open-source software, the contribution of the new implementation must be clearly stated (e.g. branch, pull requests, package...).

  • The Jury will estimate the quality of the project according to the following criteria:
  • OR relevance: Does this project serve the operations research community?
  • Clean API documentation: Is there an API documentation to use/extend the project (e.g. doxygen / javadoc like)
  • Clarity of the code: How is the code structured and documented?
  • Reliability: Are there convincing showcases, test suites, unit tests ?
  • Installation: How easy is it for a new user to install the software? Is it easy to compile/run on every platform? How are the dependencies documented/managed?
  • Ease of use: What resources are available (wiki, tutorial, reference manual...) for the user to start using the software? For libraries, what is the complexity induced in the client code?
  • Reference to literature: Are all applicable references (papers, books or original algorithms) mentioned?
  • Potential Impact: What is the size of the intended user base? How large is the benefit (class of problems addressed, optimality, time and memory performance)?

The decision of the Jury will be communicated in private to each participants before December 15, 2012.

Composition of the Jury

The jury will consist of 5 specialists (OR/CS Specialists) from academia with a strong background in implementing software as well as one representative from n-Side, the sponsor of this Award.

Award

The prize is an iPad and a full registration to ORBEL. The prize will be awarded at ORBEL conference where the winner will give a 25’ presentation on his project.
To support the international aspect of the competition, n-Side will offer the flight ticket to the winner if he/she does not come from Belgium or a neighboring country.